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No problems, the link below raises som interesting points how people should care about organised crimeThis link

oh no! the mafia wants to pirate my computer to run their online casino.

Well actually they are connecting these computers together retreiving huge numbers of banking details and access passwords, and taking off with huge amounts of money from home and business users, here in oz many unsecured users are becoming victims in this organised crime project, that will,judging by the link above, be an ongoing and everexpanding issue....

"Evidence is coming to light that spammers and virus writers are in cahoots withorganised crime gangs to create malicious programs and viruses that turn your pc into a node of a giant worldwide network, to which access is sold"

That bit sounds rather far-fetched to me.

1. It would be too easily penetrated/infiltrated
2. not enough money in it.

Where I have seen increasing numbers of reports/statistics is on the fraud side of things.

In that respect, the malware writer is no different from the people who are hired to steal automobiles or credit cards.

They are effectively a "service industry" to organised crime gangs

just my take on it

If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

Just going on the evidence that's out there.
After reading more about this subject, the more i read the more it did make sense. My take is,
you have the virus writers, who in some part are your average "look what i can do" teenager types, and then there are other writers who seem to be getting paid by the spammers to write viruses, It makes sense then,to organise this structure further by employing hackers(media definition) to break into machines to infect them with the viruses/trojans/dialers Next walks on in the crime gangs, with ample finances to buy this information and put it to work making money. Accessing banking details, credit card numbers and anything else that is of value.

Seems that this is a well run business and organised in a way that everyone is happy and gets paid in return.

Don't know how the spammers get their pay checks? Havn't researched that yet.[edit] o.k. they get paid by advertisers[edit] But the writers would be getting paid by the spammers, and the crime gangs, and the crime gangs would be reaping millions of $ from these infected machines sending them account details, passwords and credit card numbers.

Will do some more looking and update what i find.

Aside from the growing organised crime element, there are still some who do it for the kudos in their community, so much so they have formed loose "gangs", usually between 16 and 26 years old.

Motivated by financial gain, they are more and more likely to be working with spammers and hackers, says Paul Wood, chief security analyst at MessageLabs.

The sophisticated, organised crime element however, is a more worrying development and something with which corporations and home-users alike should be concerned

Detective Chief Superintendent Les Hynds, head of the UK's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, told El Reg: "The trade of BotNets on compromised machines is becoming an industry in itself. Organised crime is making use of this industry.".

The IP addresses of compromised machines are traded over IRC networks by either the virus authors themselves or middlemen with payments directed towards anonymous online accounts or (less frequently) via Western Union money transfers. In February German magazine c't reported how it was able to buy access to infected machines - commonly described in the parlance of spammers as "BotNets" - from virus writers.

Investigators are piecing together the complex relationships between the virus writers, middlemen and criminal gangs held largely responsible for the growth of spam in recent months.